Stephan Dillemuth:
In Germany the state increasingly tries to pull out of the obligation
to support the arts and hands this responsibility over to the corporate
bodies. The corporations take over for various reasons, but mainly the
desired profit is that of image transferred from the take-over of what
had previously been functions of the state.

Ina Blom: In my experience
there is a corporate state attitude towards the arts in Norway- not like
an old-fashioned socialist state attitude, but a kind of intense worry
about the proper distribution of art at all levels - a governmental worry
about what new art is and what it should do. Over the last ten years,
the culture department and the cultural council have been both very interested
in and very concerned about the new hybrid forms of art which they interpret,
rightly or wrongly, as the sign of a new type of diversity in the arts.
What is clear is that this notion of diversity is the source of great
ambivalence.. It seems to generate lot of worry, as well as a great deal
of political benevolence, on a very general level.

To take one example: I was invited
to speak at a conference organised by the cultural council (their yearly
conference on the state of the arts), where this question of the new diversity
was the big topic. Yet it was immediately apparent from their phrasing
of the question that they did not have a very precise idea about what
exactly they meant by diversity. Their questioning went along the following
lines: "This new diversity, which is obviously a good thing, isn't
it also a the sign of a problematical situation which just leads to new
hegemonies being installed?" Diversity is of course a highly overdetermined
term, in the sense that even in this specific context it had many meanings
at once. With a view to traditional modernist aesthetics, the new diversity
could be seen as problematical because it disrupts the notion of a common
ground for evaluating art based on an understanding of the conventions
of genre. At the same time, it was claimed, diversity must be a "good
thing", and even here the reasons were plural. Firstly, because it
somehow links up with a type of thinking where artistic expressions are
associated with anti-authoritarian tendencies, and where art is imagined
as a room for "other voices". And secondly, because a democratic
society should seek to support a diversity of artistic practices and expressions,
different kinds of art should coexist without being constrained by old
hierarchies of taste, and so on.
A lot of different applications of the concept of diversity were, in other
words, layered on top of each other as a vague expression of the ambivalence
felt by politicians and administrators faced with the obvious complexity
of the cultural field. In this confused situation, then, they evidently
looked for a concept which could transform this ambivalence into something
resembling a critique. The concept they found was hegemony, and the question
was whether the new diversity did not in fact produce new criteria of
quality which, by not being immediately transparent and accessible to
the whole of society, would be the symptoms of new cultural hegemonies,
i.e. (in their phrasing) a new streamlining or unification of the cultural
field.

Josephine Pryde: The fact
that you might also have had some sort of criticism of the 'goodness'
of diversity - could that register in any way as some kind of a counter
force?

IB: Judging from my writings
they could read my stance to be pro-diversity in some way or other. So
I was, not inappropriately, asked to speak on behalf of the "new
diversity", in other words on behalf of the supposed new hegemony.
Yet the concept of hegemony was approached in an extremely simplistic
and negative way here, as somebody taking on power, cancelling out everything
else. The point I tried to make, in response to their question was that
hegemony can not simply be likened to unification or totalisation. Hegemonic
processes can, on the contrary, be linked to democratic processes, situations
where diversity is both possible and operative. Hegemonic processes are
articulations in situations where there are open conflicts of interests,
and where such articulations are possible precisely because the social
system is not experienced as closed or defined once and for all, but as
open to negotiation.
Hegemonic processes would, in our case, be an example of the openness
of the cultural field, and the positive, if difficult, presence of conflict.

SD: I could imagine that
they were worried what diversity could mean when it is promoted as the
latest trend. But then they discuss this problem in a way of creating
a consensus about it. And that is a Catch 22-situation, with consensus,
you have created hegemony.

IB: Well my point is still
that hegemonic processes are in themselves signs of the actual existence
of diversity at play, a conflictual diversity.... Their problem was essentially
one of trying to get a grip on the cultural totality, to get a grip on
diversity "from above" so to speak, so as to be able to imagine
diversity as harmonious coexistence. Yet, the very notion of cultural
or social totality is of course a dangerous type of construct. In this
case it seems to a typically state corporate way of thinking about culture,
being primarily concerned with who is going to govern and control an ideal
diversity. I'm afraid this is ultimately an effect of the widespread tendency
to divorce art from the social and political, to imbue it with a certain
innocence (often against better knowledge). But this is not the important
issue regarding art and diversity. The challenge is to appreciate the
different and eventually conflictual positions as something that can not
simply be resolved or kept in check within a system whose model seems
to approach that of a closely surveyed field. It is a fact that I may
be deeply involved with specific artistic milieus or topics that might
be of little immediate relevance or interest to other groups of people,
groups who might be in their full right to contest my bid for legitimacy
and power, who might dislike my particular application of the concept
of "diversity" .... but for whom and on what level should this
be a problem?

JP: How much do you think
that Norway's comparatively small commercial art system affects the interest
of the state ? The private gallery system is not so highly developed here,
is it?

IB: No, it's not very
highly developed. It possibly puts more pressure on the state to provide
for art (but I'm not sure that it actually works that way). But I also
think that this system of stipends or other support-systems for artists
is specifically made to works towards some ideal of diversity. It's been
locally distributed and basically not all that hard to get.

Gardar Eide Einarsson:
I haven't been able to get them, so fuck them anyway. But I think
it's true that they establish a certain kind of diversity, but it's strange
how this seems to be a very homogenising form of diversity - a concept
I think is particularly well understood in the Scandinavian countries/cultures
- a kind of mock diversity intended to give an impression of diversity
while at the same time preventing real diversity. The idea of education
is underlined - this idea that they expect you to make your projects available
to everyone.

IB: It's very much part
of that. You speak to people in the cultural sector, very idealistic people,
who say that we've got to make all those art centres around the country
understand what conceptual art is or what performance is all about. But
that's so besides the point. The basic idea here is of course an ideal
of equal distribution of information which matters a lot in some places.
But the other side of the coin is an homogenising operation and a terrible
fear of dissent. They can't bear the idea that groups of artists or audiences
should stand in opposition to each other - or that they could experience
each other as not having the same interests or priorities or experiences.
This is because Norwegian politics since the second world war has definitely
tended towards homogeneity and harmonising.

JP: This sounds like a
society in perfect shape to handle the discovery of a huge oil reserve .

SD: Yes but what is the
role of a critic and intellectual in such a choric and rich society?
I guess one wants to insert a difference to it and start triggering a
debate about it.
But then, on the other hand, you don't really want to succeed in convincing
everybody, because then you'll have a homogeneous society again. It's
probably not so much about winning as it is about starting the game

IB: Certainly. I think
it's so terrible that we are bound to think about (visual) art as fundamentally
one thing, one institution, one big project. And somehow, whatever you
do, you will be seen to add something to that or to subtract something
from it, or to change it a little bit. I think it's so stifling! For almost
ten years I was a music critic (rock/electronic) and my experience in
that field was quite different. Nobody hold me accountable for my personal
preferences with a view to the totality of the field, nobody cared if
I completely ignored a host of important expressions with big audiences,
such as heavy metal or country music. Whereas once I entered the field
of visual art, I was immediately held accountable for not taking an interest
in this or that artistic phenomenon. Suddenly, as a critic, I was made
responsible for "all art". I find this strange and artificial,
and would be very happy if I could be able to work against those constraints.
Primarily by continuing to ignore what does not interest me.

GEE: It seems that the
scene in Norway has only few key-people, especially critics and curators.
Do you see that as a part of the problem?

IB: There are not that
many music critics, either. There are only a few publications that write
seriously about music. Whereas art criticism has expanded, music criticism
has decreased: with all the new dance music, many felt they couldn't write
anymore perhaps because there were fewer big personalities and
less emphasis on lyrics.

SD: But how does this
particularity relate to a concept of international art, a very particular
one as well, which has been created over the last ten years? I am talking
here about a certain flock of artists, circulated through all the institutions
and biennials which supposedly represents diversity on an international
level.
To the extent that "international artist" has become a trademark
for a certain stable of artists and that's what corporate collections
and private collections and museums buy. Norway, through its inferiority
complex of never having been connected well enough to this circuit, is
importing it as well.

IB: But what would be
the alternative?

SD: Well, I have some
suggestions which I'll put in the footnotes , but I am just wondering
how you would apply your idea of particularity under these circumstances

IB: Certainly not in terms
of my supposed cultural context, because I do not know how to define such
a thing. I'm saying this because this biennial thing is obviously very
easy to criticise. The worst thing about this internationalism is that
what you're supposed to bring to this scene is, paradoxically, often a
type of cultural particularity, which is predefined by some biennial-committee.
So when I am asked to represent something in this context I am invariably
asked to pick some Norwegian artists, write about some Norwegian topic
and so forth, and all this just feels completely artificial to me. As
an academic, as a critic, this is not what I write about. I do not represent
Norway, as such. It particularly annoys me because this is something that
happens to you if you happen to be from a country which is imagined to
have been just recently 'recruited' to an international context. But of
course the focus on "the Norwegian" is produced from within
as well. I reckon Norway has become much more provincial during the last
20 or 30 years. To someone like my grandparents this division between
Norway and the rest of Europe didn't exist in that way. This is a very
recent construct and you can see it in almost all academic departments:
the tendency to write about anything Norwegian has increased - to define
the Norwegian this and the Norwegian that, as if the Norwegian was, in
itself, an obvious, self-explanatory context. So that is why I am not
willing to discuss the international as something that would be in opposition
to my own critical arena or particularity.

GEE: I think this is an
interesting point in relation to the question of a corporate public, because
it implies that the corporation wants to invest in shaping a public in
its own image. When you talk about the 'corporate national' situation
in Norway - the national corporation: it is about shaping the audience
to believe in this sort of Norwegian or Nordic scene.

SD: Corporate strategies
and Norwegian state politics fall pretty much together. Whereas in Central
Europe it seems a cultural competition is going on between regions in
order to offer themselves as attractive sites for investment.

JP: It seems to me that , the more common global rhetoric becomes,
the more a local area needs to be created in which to expand it - as if
devolution is actually directly linked to the kind of rhetoric that supports
an idea of world wide democracy.. - Tony Blair, who is very interested
in globalisation, devolved Great Britain according to his election manifesto,
very soon after taking office - after giving the Bank of England control
of interest rates. Scotland, Wales and England were turned into three
separately governed areas, with England as the central one.

GEE: ..which of course
mimics the logic of corporations now partitioning up their structure into
smaller, more cell-like (in the terrorist organisation kind of way) units,
enabling the corporation to hold several positions in one market as well
as making the structure more opaque and less vulnerable.

SD: In this case you could
speak of a revival of the nation state through the region. For Norway
it is probably more the nation state than the region.

IB: simply because
we are only 4 million, it is hard to imagine regions on the scale you
may see in the rest of Europe

SD: most of the
corporations are partly owned by the state, anyway, Telenor, Norsk Hydro,
Statoil

JP: I remember reading
that the Norwegian government has an oil fund, which they invest as a
pension fund for the whole country. I also saw the job advertisement for
someone to run the fund a while back. Has the state invested the oil fund
mainly in Norwegian business? How might the fund be affected if the state's
stakes decrease?

IB: I think most of it
is invested abroad, sadly also in corporations which do not comply with
the ethical standards we enforce in our own country. At the moment the
oil fund is really at the core of Norwegian politics. We all know that
it [the oil] won't last forever and that Norway is still like an underdeveloped
country that only exports raw materials. Unless they develop some tremendously
interesting high-tech industry, which they have only done in the field
of oil-technology so far, there are going to be problems. That's why the
oil fund is going to be a continual hot topic - this will show at the
next elections in September .

SD: If we come back from
the election as the tool of democratic self-administration of a common,
national agenda and we return to the question of the particularity of
one's interest and life-context: how would you define your addressee?
Who are your communication partners and to what end?

IB: I'm really inspired
by Ray Johnson. He is generally hailed as the "father" of mail
art, although he rejected mail art as a system and an art-ideology, when
this developed. He just worked with the postal system and with the idea
of letters - sent, returned, dislocated, mislaid, misread, re-distributed
- a whole system of very complicated but also very concrete displacements
of the whole notion of "communication." For me, these kinds
of questions - like this question of who is my addressee or my communication
partner - are the questions I try not to answer in advance. Of course,
I want to talk to and to learn from certain people and I have a strong
sense of being part of a group of people with certain particular interests
and tastes, which is very important to me on a daily basis. But on the
other hand I wouldn't want to know exactly in advance what the effect
of my writing will be or who it should reach, who exactly should read
it and understand it what I'm saying instead is that I am
protecting my right to not make sure that everybody understands me.

SD: However, art institutions
and mainstream media want to include everything and it should be understood
by everyone. The question could be how much we define ourselves through
differentiation and the particularity of our fields and to what extent
do we feel the necessity for de-differentiation. I think we have to work
on both these ends in order to avoid to preach to the converted.

IB: A symptom of this
problem is the big emphasis in Norway (and perhaps also elsewhere) on
what we call kunstformidling which is the field of mediation of the arts.
Yesterday I was part of a small audience who took part in a discussion
about sociologist Dag Solhjell's recent book about kunstformidling. The
main point of the book - the idea that artworks depend on presentational
contexts and that there are a number of rhetorical strategies surrounding
the artwork - is not exactly new. But Solhjell was using this kind of
insight to create a new methodology for art criticism, a proper analytical
apparatus which allows you to finally "get at" all this mystical
and hard-to grasp art by defining its paratexts down to the minutest details
(Solhjell is using Gerard Genette's terminology here). I found the whole
thing slightly claustrophobic - particularly since the book does not get
into the both problematic and productive differentiation that is produced
in the dialectic between art and its frames, but stays with a rigid category
of "work" which in its turn depends on a context that determines
its meaning (at least for the analytical purposes of art criticism), while
remaining firmly exterior to it. In short, a series of terms that has
been used for years in order to question the very object of art criticism,
ends up as tools used to circumscribe this object in a closer and apparently
more precise or transparent manner. It seemed to me somehow symptomatic
of the ideals of the discipline of kunstformidling: "Art may seem
difficult, but we have the methodological key that will unlock its secrets
for you. We know how its secrets are produced".

SD: As far as I understand
it, you are saying here also that Solhjell provides a method to confirm
the context as what it appears to be. That has a stabilising effect which
is at the core quite conservative. I would prefer to see art as an agent
to within a specific context in order to question and to change it. But
anyway, art will turn away if formidling becomes too dominant.

IB: To return to the question
of art and corporations, I would like to mention 'Momentum' the Nordic
biennial in the city of Moss, (which I curated in 2000, along with Jonas
Ekeberg, Paula Toppila and Jacob Fabricius). This was supposed to be the
big art event where local and national corporations would support contemporary
art on a big scale. All I can say is that this did not happen. Norwegian
corporations prefer to be identified with ski jumpers, violinists, symphony
orchestras and theatres anything but contemporary art, it seems.
We ended up in a situation where corporations paid ridiculously small
sums to be named "main sponsors". Maybe the people behind 'Momentum'
were inept in generating this desire for identification .but even
so, that experience made it apparent that Norwegian corporations are generally
not geared towards contemporary art.

GEE: This fusion between
art and corporations in Norway appears still quite clumsy and un-advanced,
making it quite transparent. That makes Norway look like a proto-version
of what's happening in other countries, and in my mind makes it a good
case study for how this fusion is forged and developed into more advanced
form.

IB: But if this discourse
of creativity, which is the preferred discourse when art and corporations
merge, was done in a more sophisticated manner, do you think that it would
lead to an artistically or critically better situation?

GEE: Of course not. To
the contrary, if we return to the idea of hegemony it is much easier to
establish/maintain a functional opposition to hegemonic practices if one
can understand their mechanics, and in the case of the fusion business=culture
in Norway right now I think it is possible to identify some of these mechanics.

IB: Recently I read a
classical statement by Philip Morris. When they sponsored the now famous
exhibition "When Attitudes Become Form" they were using the
discourse of creativity - even this latest discourse of 'conceptual creativity'
- as a reason for their natural connection to the conceptual art-movement.
Consequently, "creativity" - this most flattering and general
of all art concepts - should fill us with scepticism ....

JP: and even if
there is refusal, then that's also part of the give and take

IB: Exactly. This doesn't
address the particularities of specific cultural communities or aesthetic
interests, and the implications of these. It's a question of accessing
creativity as the most valid metaphor for business acumen. To return to
Momentum: while on the one hand there was almost no corporate interest,
the interests of the local politicians was also problematic. They were
attuned to the idea that cities can be invigorated by means by means of
the contemporary practice of site-specific art, which keep audiences walking
about the city looking for the "sites". Not only on a commercial
level (selling food and drink to all these people), but also on a symbolical
level, in the sense that all the little places and monuments of the city
would be reworked critically or sentimentally by artists .... this would
somehow elevate the city and give it a new reflection of itself, it's
image enhanced by art. So the local politicians wanted us to have a certain
number of artists doing site specific work in the streets of Moss. As
curators we objected to this - the participants should be free to present
what was relevant in terms of their own production.

SD: A lot of these local politicians invest in culture because
they want to attract investment, not corporate sponsors of the exhibition,
but corporate investment into the city, the urban infrastructure. Did
that happen? Were the sponsors from outside or inside Moss?

IB: As I recall it, the
most important sponsors were local. It is too early to say how the biennial
works for the city's infrastructure - it's only been organised twice.

SD: So most of the money
came from the city in the end ?

IB: And from the government

JP: Did you feel that
the corporations and the politicians were already talking to each other,
anyway? Or were you the bridge between those two in terms of the exhibition?

IB: Well, there wasn't
really a bridge because the corporate interests failed I guess you
must know a lot about Telenor's artistic engaged a group of international
high-profile artists to create pieces for their new headquarter at the
old airport of Fornebu, works that will in some way profile their role
as a big communications corporation.

JP: This is what Peter
Lund means by integrated art, then - he said it was art, which would be
part of the building, integrated into the walls etc

GEE: It seems to represent
two different corporate strategies: one is that corporations give a small
amount of money and expect the presence of their logo, the other one is
more the idea that the corporation controls the creative process

SD: Still, this could
lead to an interesting output, but I'm not so convinced with the idea
of decorating castles or educating employees. I find it more interesting
to see how the public sphere becomes shaped through the corporate takeover
of functions of the state and, at the same time we see corporate and cultural
infiltration into all aspects of daily life. Identity politics, the notions
difference, subcultures, multi-culture, counter-culture, you name it
every particular sector is welcome to be targeted as a market. And then
identity is either defined through consumption or through (the corporate
support of) cultural activities. There is hardly any sector in our society
anymore which is not culturalised in the sense that it is corporatised.
And that is the only glue that holds the fragmented public together and
gives us the impression that we can still talk about one civic public.
The nation state lost its sovereignty to a global economy which replaced
the phenomenon formerly known as the public sphere with a multiplicity
of factions. It is still the fantasy of the nation that covers up the
loss of a homogeneity of life-context and it is the reality of the ubiquity
of the market that indeed holds it together.

IB: There is no doubt
that the general aesthetisisation of culture is in great part a result
of the corporate dynamics you describe here. Yet I am perhaps a bit sceptical
to your theory as an analytical tool, simply because of its generality.
If everything everywhere is the result of the same process, how can we
describe differences? And is a "market" always the same thing?
What I do know, and what interests me at the moment, is the fact that
many artists and critics are working with the very terms of this aesthetisised
reality, trying (more or less explicitly) to explore the kind of challenges
it poses to traditional concepts like "work", "style",
"audiences", "reception" and so on.

SD: Since it is talked
about globalisation so much, I thought that this was about the effects
of neo-liberal capitalism spreading all over the world. If this is true
we would have a general backdrop, in front of which we could see a multitude
of highly differentiated (cultural) identities being targeted as markets
and being constituted through markets. And exactly this is, I agree, the
battleground for art, but not so much in order to participate in the game
as it is - culturalisation - but against it, if possible.

IB: I agree on this, and
see the new focus on style as part of such a critical exploration of what
we're up against. Yet the fact that all kinds of things are potentially
targeted as markets, does not mean that these strategies are always successful
or even feasible. This is one of the things I mean by difference here.